A Panegyric to the Red Seraph
by natureflea
Summary: There seems to glow suspended in her pores a certain ageless halfbirth...


**A Panegyric to the Red Seraph.**

The room is dark and dusty. It feels muddy at the corners. It is here I shuck deliberately the peeling husk of my soul, layering it copiously upon the furniture and floor. This room is an appendage of myself; it is, like me, contaminated, and like me it totes a growing germ, and like me it is diving and surfacing in a dirty sea. It has its roots in a strange, red grief, and it is the same red grief that squats sorely on the outskirts of my brain. And it remembers...

_We sit in my garrett._

_There seems to glow suspended in her pores a certain ageless half-birth, curling back again and again upon her beauty. This is an empty genesis not belonging to anyone, yet still it is so intricately planted in her, and somehow in me, and as we both emerge from these pitch depths - as mute fish learning to walk - I can feel a personal world birth and bloat between us. It is impossible to accurately describe! I see it best on wan and overcast days, and in the rarest nooks of privacy, when her face is soft, thoughtful and remote, and astoundingly impassable, like a tree in the road. It is then, on the edge of a moment, when she is strange and unspeaking, that it comes on, and though she be silently dour or sad I feel I suddenly know her better than any man could ever._

_She looks out the window now, and as I listen and stare I hear music rising from the street below. Her hair is fantastically, preposterously stark against the curtain! The angle of her chin is dizzying! And I -- I am mad, foolish, infantile. But I love and I love and I love, even as I taper off to nonsense. For how could so fine and diaphanous a thing live, and with every movement conjure images and sound? When she inclines her head towards me playfully, I see wild, uncultivated children toying viciously with a rag ball. When she stares loftily into the distance, her smile unformed, I see puffed and gaudy opera-going ladies. Sometimes she is sly and meretricious, sometimes guileless and good. With a movement of the hand she can recall dance halls or depthless skies. Contrary creature that I rarely comprehend! She towers above me limitless, and I can only grapple desperately below._

_She shoots me a look out of the corner of her eye, and with this unhems my enlightenment. I now feel like a child who fails to pronounce a long word. When a moment before I thought I knew her utterly, unequivocally, now I am stammering and unsure, and she a shy and wordless vixen. I blush and look back at my typewriter, biting my top lip, not wondering at but accepting her inaccessibility. But when I glance back up I see she is smiling._

The lovebird has died today.

It is a warm evening and the sun is coming in, pooling somehow perfectly and clumping with lint. All is ease.

Earlier it was warmer still, and as I wrapped the bird's tiny body in a cloth I felt the light, motherly, on my arms. I suppose there must be some poor, shipwrecked kernel of hope in my body; some desperate atom of a different time, clinging to a sliver of what was; for when the light played so on my arms - as I leaned out the window and collected the cage, and as a grey accordionist whined sourly somewhere close - I felt the smallest, fractured iota of demented liberation; that this skinny yellowing world was true and beautiful; unanticipatedly stupefying and indubitable. It was not the high blue infatuation of other days, when my eyes bobbed romantically among stars; it was a strange, unemotive freedom, spilling from my chest and adoring the bent old-women trees, the grubby buildings, the mills, the dubious faceless people and the soft, rigid thing in my hand.

For I felt as if I held an intelligent heart. I slipped the clothed bird into my coat pocket, pulled on a short brown hat, and clattered out and down into the street.

_"All you need is love!" I say, and it is wonderfully easy. My life is clamouring racing singing sobbing madly to such dizzy heights, where extravagant planets wearing tail coats and rouge cluster joyfully under my feet, and the sky is swarming and impossible, and every dumb building suddenly wakes and lisps a name; one name, again and again, a name I shout and acclaim in loving exaltation; bedding it in melodies; dressing in it; eating it; reiterating it unendingly._

_I hurry down through Montmartre, and the world is innocent and beautiful and earnest. The trees are wistful and in love with the breeze; the breeze is melancholy, for it cannot touch them. Every passing human harbours within them a fervent love, and each is thinking of its secret; a portrait painter looks tenderly at his subject; a wiry musician sings reverentially of loving. The weather is cold, but warmth somehow permeates my soul. Love, love, love. All you need, all you will ever need, is love._

There was certain quiet as I reached the cemetery. The small clots of occasional people at first thinned and then vanished entirely, and I stood now overlooking a grassy dip and an unmoving yellow mill, near which the cemetery prostrated itself, low-lying and descending the _butte_. I felt uncomfortably like an old, putrid stain exposed shamefully to light; I was unshaven, my clothes had the heavy, animal odour of cigars, my teeth were sick and tobacco-stained, and my lips recalled liquor. It was wrong to be beyond the low light of bars or the dimness of my room; it was wrong to so mar the earthy golds of evening. Yet that hateful grain of hope drummed pointedly in my chest. I had to go on.

I padded towards the cemetery and edged through its single entrance, beside which some sodden, muddy flowers had been dropped or blown. I trod over them. The ground crunched in greeting, being brown with mounting leaf litter from the surrounding population of trees. I enjoyed this aberrant sound as I surveyed the mosaic of graves. The sun shied behind a tree and ran like liquid through its limbs, a bird harped in its language, the wind blew and leaves tossled with each other. I felt slightly easier in this shade; less well-defined and naked; less like something gross and incomplete.

_Desolation despair affliction sickness red agony anguish torment asperity red dejection wretched broken afraid struck red, struck red and white, agape dismay and wordless agitation, and struck and struck and struck forever..._

_The strange twisted curios of the aphotic wings where light is leached by the convoluted things that people swap for marrow and wine and all this is a loose and bloodshot thing that I cannot fortify, or lace--_

_--with anything more than--_

_Rose petals!_

_But nothing. I can think of nothing, except: this cannot be happening. I feel too little and too much. I am like a child bereft. I think there is a great wound growing in me; everything is red and liquid and impalpable, everything is running; life is fluid and shadowy. But I can think of nothing. This cannot be happening. I am so afraid._

_You've got to go on, she says._

I walked with deliberate intention through the multifarious graves, some of which had crosses, had rock, had sculptures, had vaults, had nothing. None, on this day, seemed to brim with still-healthy flowers - indicative of recent visitations - and this suggested to the mind a certain vague neglect, intensifying the dead peacefulness radiating from the place; the lack of human artificiality and presence, and the natural stillness that hung around the trees. Yet the graves were abundant, like a mute civilisation, all dated after eighteen twenty-five. They seemed assembled almost on top of each other, the more noticeable above the smaller, some adorned with alarmingly impressive, refined and prodigious sculptures. Many were chipped and veined with moss; a number were over seventy years of age.

Moving consciously to a duskier corner of the cemetery, I approached a more recent grave. As a stone had not been purchased to mark it, it was impossible to accurately judge its age: but I knew it was little over two years old. I knelt down habitually beside it. Someone - not myself - had placed a small rock at its head as decoration, on which had been arduously carved a now weathered, inconspicuous word. I looked at it. It sat accompanied by a dried flaking rose and a pinecone.

I felt slightly tired.

With my fingers I began to scrape a shallow hole in the dirt by the little rock. This done and readied, I removed the bird from my coat.

_Blackness like oil seems to fill this room and get inside me and I cannot get it out, though I have skin beneath my nails and I have flooded myself and flooded myself and tried to burn my interior. My inlands are ravaged; their landscape is garbled and backward. I tried to end myself but it could not work and I feared losing even the blackness, for if I die where will it go, who will it inhabit, and what more can it do than clog tightly around my demise and ruin me, never relenting, and never releasing, and leaving me a brainless black blot in a deluge of nothing._

_I smoke and sit on the floor. I am alone and the world is quiet. A stranger lives in the room above mine since Toulouse vacated it, and the avenues outside are likewise strangers, and the throngs of painters and writers and musicians thrumming identically in Montmartre are strangers, and the women are all strangers, and the people in the bars are strangers, and I am a stranger smoking and sitting on the floor in a black room with a black drink and old clothes._

_There is only one who is not a stranger._

I unfolded its small body, revealing its rounded beak and lightless eye.

_And I cannot say her name._

Its feathers twitched playfully as the wind picked up.

_I rise from the corner to get another bottle. I find that there are none. Somehow, this does not anger me, and I slump down in a chair near the window, before my typewriter. I stay like this. I feel I have become like rock or stone, perfectly amorphous._

I began to lower it towards the hole I had dug.

_I look from the window to the typewriter and watch the wordless page inserted in it as if it might animate. I run my fingers very lightly over the keys, feeling half-drunk and nervous._

The breeze grew strong, despite the day's warmth, and blew my hat from my head. I dropped the body.

_Suddenly, like an unexpected catharsis, I drum six letters onto the page. And another six, and another six, and another six, until they snake violently all over the paper, and I have to tear it out and fist it and throw it through the curtains, and not watch where it lands or how it falls or whether or not the sky takes hold of it. I do this twice more, before sitting back and rubbing my head with the heel of my hand. Then I lean forward._

I snatched fumblingly at my hat and caught the brim of it, folding it under my arm and returning to the grave. But the bird I had dropped had not touched the ground: it had got a current and taken wing on it; it had hit the air; it had unfurled its minikin wings; and it was flying. It was neither stiff nor bloodied but fluid with life, and as I gawped and watched it it flitted here and there, small and plump; burningly incogitable yet astoundingly actual.

_And I type: This is a story about love._

I sat, leaning back on my hands and blinking at the sky, but the bird had vanished among a thicket and could be seen no more. I let my gaze slip to the little rock on the grave and I looked at it dumbly, feeling shaken and alive.

The word on the rock was 'love', simple and modest and not demanding of anything. And I smiled.

_Satine._

Satine.

---

**a/n** - hehe, this is really melodramatic! but it was sort of fun to write, if a bit confusing. :-) edited it a trifle.

**disclaimer** - I don't own _Moulin Rouge!_, it belongs to Baz Luhrmann and other people who aren't me.


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